Gun Free School Zone case in Texas Appealed to Fifth Circuit

A “Gun Free School Zone” case has been appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The appeal attacks the Gun Free School Zone Act (GFSZA) as being an unconstitutional infringement of rights protected by the Second Amendment.   An amicus brief has been filed by the California Rifle and Pistol Association (CRPA), the Second Amendment Law Center, and the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF).

From January 5  to 29, 2023, Ahmed Allam spent several hours in the afternoon and evening parked across the street from a parochial school, St. Anthony Cathedral Basilica School in Beaumont, Texas. Police were called nine times. On January 25, police warned Mr. Allam the plastic frame around his license plate was obscuring the state of registration, a violation.  On Sunday evening, January 29, 2023 Mr. Allam was parked across from the school from 4:00 P.M. to about 9:05 P.M., when he started to drive away from the school. An police officer followed him and pulled him over for failing to signal a turn. He refused to talk to police and was arrested for the license plate violation.

The car was searched. An AR-15 rifle, two 50 round boxes of ammunition, and a 30 round magazine were found.

A grand jury charged Mr. Allam with a single count of violating the Gun Free School Zone Act. Mr. Allam challenged the law on an “as applied” basis, claiming the GFSZA violated the Second Amendment. The district court judge, Marcia A. Crone, found the Gun Free School Zone Act was Constitutional. Mr. Allam plead guilty without a plea deal and was sentenced to 5 years in prison on January 30, 2024. Mr. Allam submitted a timely appeal to the United States Court of appeals for the Fifth Circuit on February 1, 2024.

On July 19, 2024, the amicus curae (friend of the court) brief was file for the CRPA, the Second Amendment Law Center, and the SAF.

In the Allam case, the Judge Crone relied on similar arguments put forward in the Montana GFSZA case in Billings. She made the claim buffer zones around polling places on election day were close enough to permanent 1,000 foot zones around schools as a reasonable analogy. As the defense and the Amicus brief explain, this analogy does not work to overcome the restraints of the Second Amendment. From the amicus brief:

Third, even if the exceedingly few 19th-century polling place buffer zone laws the district court cited were deemed sufficient in number to be valid historical analogues, they are not relevantly similar to the school zone restriction of §922(q)(2)(A) in terms of the burden they impose. The polling place buffer zones would only apply on election days, totaling no more than two-to-three days in a given year depending on how many federal, state, local, and primary elections occurred. By contrast, the school zone laws apply all day long, every day of the year, regardless of the presence of children or staff, including when school is not in session and the school year is over.

Analysis: The Montana Gun Free School Zone Act case has a sentencing hearing scheduled for August 2, 2024. The Montana case started on August 23, 2023, about seven months after Mr. Allam was arrested in Beaumont, Texas. A plea deal was agreed to. An appeal will not be filed until after the sentencing hearing. The Fifth Circuit, which serves Texas, is considered to be much more considerate of rights protected by the Second Amendment than is the Ninth Circuit, which has jurisdiction in the Billings, Montana case.  It is likely one or both of the appeals will find the GFSZA to be unconstitutional. Circuit Court appeals tend to take time. Book long briefs are filed in constitutional cases. Decisions and dissents are often over 100 pages long. It is likely the results of the appeal in the Texas case and the likely appeal in the Montana case will not be known before the end of 2024.

©2024 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

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